Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book is one of the most brilliant briefs ever published by an advocate ... Lyell relied upon true bits of cunning to establish his uniformitarian views as the only true geology. First, he set up a straw man to demolish ... In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to require catastrophes: rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hard-nosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists.

From a purely scientific point of view, it is unwise to accept uniformitarianism as unalterable dogma.… (One) should never close his mind to the possibility that conditions in post geological time were different than today.…

It is both easy and tempting ... to adopt a neocatastrophist attitude to the fossil record.… This is a heady wine and has intoxicated paleontologists since the day when they could blame it all on Noah's flood. In fact, books are still being published by the lunatic fringe with the same explanation. In case this book should be read by some fundamentalist searching for straws to prop up his prejudice, let me state categorically that all my experience (such as it is) has led me to an unqualified acceptance of evolution by natural selection as a sufficient explanation for what I have seen in the fossil record. I find divine creation, or several such creations, a completely unnecessary hypothesis. Nevertheless this is not to deny that there are some very curious features about the fossil record.

“I am sure you may get into Q. R. [Quarterly Review] what will free the science from Moses … . I conceived the idea five or six years ago, that if ever the Mosaic geology could be set down without giving offence, it would be in an historical sketch, and you must abstract mine … .”